10 Great Bands That Only Made One Album

Being as we’re shameless music geeks here at Flavorpill, we occasionally get to discussing shamelessly music geeky topics. Like, for instance, this one: great bands who’ve only made one album. The history of music is littered with bands and artists who, for whatever reason, never got beyond a single memorable record (and we’re not counting live albums or compilations here.) Some of these bands broke up, some of them were sundered by death or tragedy, and some simply went onto other things. But in every case, we’re left wondering what might have been had they got a chance to make a follow-up. After the jump, we’ve listed ten artists we’d have loved to have heard from again — what are yours?

They’re best known for their gloriously bratty debut single “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!,” but X-Ray Spex’s only album (which, curiously, didn’t include that song) was pretty much all gold. It married the sadly departed Poly Styrene’s cheerful screeching to a raucous and ramshackle soundtrack of clattering drums, guitars and Lora Logic’s saxophone. The band broke up when Styrene went off to be a Hare Krishna in 1979, leaving only this album to remember them by. Proudly unconventional and full of a wide-eyed sense of possibility, Germ Free Adolescents embodied everything that was great about punk.